The Savage Side: Reclaiming Violent Models of God [Hardcover]

This book articulates an important corrective to a dominant 'model of God'. Most importantly, it charts a fresh trajectory for natural theologyone that, interestingly enough, has far more in common with the God we meet in biblical texts than the one whitewashed by our moral and political pieties.Her [Carrol's] critique is broadly persuasive.This book demands to be read by anyone, regardless of their religious, political, or ethnic identity, interested in the relationship between religion and politics. Not all readers will agree with all of Carroll's perceptions but most will by stirred by the depth of her God-wrestling as well as by her skillful exploration of how surprisingly intertwined secular literature and philosophy are with divinity's challenge and summons to humanity. Even those deeply discomfited by her unwavering message will be struck by the unsettling beauty of her close readings of Dillard and Levinas, surely two of the most robust thinkers of the late twentieth century. It is a boldly confrontational work and a great challenge to us all.The Savage Side critiques the primary models of deity in dominant political theologies, especially those which align God with the natural world. The justice-seeking, political revolutionary God that the oppressed worship has dwindled back to the political fervor from which it sprang. In its place, a God based on our struggling existence in the natural world emerges, terrifyingly indifferent to any political or moral ideology.In this book, B. Jill Carroll uses the nature writing of Annie Dillard and the philosophical categories of Emmanual Levinas to critique the models of God that drive contemporary political theologies, especially feminist and liberation theologies. These political theologies ignore the amoral and often harsh aspects of our existence in the natural world, even though they often align God with the cosmos. Political theologies excise from their models of God all notions of violence, indifference to solS.